


butterfly

by Way_Out_There



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Death, F/F, F/M, It's the Hunger Games okay, Kinda, Multi, Romance, Violence, multiple AUs, tw: assault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-09-23 12:40:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20340259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Way_Out_There/pseuds/Way_Out_There
Summary: 24 tributes. 24 victories. 24 worlds. These are the children who lost so that Katniss and Peeta could win.





	1. One of Many

_“Ladies and gentlemen, the victor of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games...District One Male, Marvel Zhou!” _

He is a miracle worker with a spear but no one really wins the Games with a spear, not when they’re bad in close quarters and get chopped in half by swords, not for One boys when the Fours always get them first. 

That’s why Marvel is trained to use rapiers and broadswords and he succeeds there, too. He’s watched by upper management in 1 and is told one cold summer’s night that he will be going into the 74th. He’s assigned Chardonnay Campbell as a mentor, and Char is brash and warns him that Marvel is one of many boys that pass through his care so he shouldn’t get cocky, but promises him that he will do everything in his power to get Marvel through. And then his partner is announced as Glimmer Sarinas, who is talented and gorgeous and has that smile, that smile, and both Chardonnay and Diamond turn their attention from Marvel to Glimmer. Marvel doesn’t let himself feel hurt by it. He is one of many. Both of them are fickle, anyway. When the 12 pair is announced, Char and Diamond spend the rest of the week hissing over the coal trash more than they actually give advice. Marvel feels sorry for Glimmer, honestly. It keeps him from feeling sorry for himself. 

Char tells him to get a sword as soon as possible, be graceful, strong, a leader, but Cato is also a swordsman and Marvel steps back from the clear alpha rather than die early. He finds a spear and resigns himself to it and doesn’t focus on how _right_ it feels in his hands. Cato postures and grows more aggressive and Clove waits in the corners of his vision for her moment to strike. When the two of them are in the dirt, passed on from Jacker venon, Marvel only hesitates for a moment. 

He only hesitates for a moment before setting the grainfields on fire and watching as it spreads to the forest. The tributes run from it like rabbits. (He has never actually seen a rabbit until the Arena, just worked with their pelts up in 1, and it shocks him how similar the lithe, jumping creatures are to actual, living people.) He has never seen a person’s intestines until the 11 boy runs into his sword. 

The innards still hang off of him as they lift him into the sky. His final suit sports thick bangles carved from rubies and topaz. He wonders if they were manufactured by some worker in District 1 who is dying of starvation. Caesar Flickerman calls him a golden boy and it takes a moment for him to respond. 

“What _will_ Snow do with you?” Chardonnay ponders after the final interview. 

“It won’t make a difference,” Marvel snaps.

Char shrugs. Marvel can’t come up with a response. He may have been golden now, but he isn’t stupid enough to believe he is the only golden boy. Instictively, he knows he’ll get boring soon enough. It doesn’t quite seem to matter. He felt alive in the Arena, where he at least knew that everyone was going to turn on him. Now he feels watched, threatened, but he can’t fight back.

He goes back to District 1 in a haze. The next six months are cycles of working out and binge-eating the sweets he was never allowed. He breaks out for the first time. (He didn’t know that his skin could allow the acne.) Char calls him useless and a glutton. Cashmere brings him more chocolate and asks his opinions on the quality of the new white roses that Char has been curating in the garden of Victor’s Village. “I’m fine, thanks,” Marvel says, and Cashmere leaves the chocolate with a somber smile. Marvel is one of many, but he’s not stupid, and he doesn’t plan on being executed anytime soon.

He outlives Char, at least, and dies at 37 in a morphling overdose. He leaves behind two children who have no idea who their father is and a rebellion slowly smoldering in the depths of District 1.


	2. Diamond Girl

_“Ladies and gentlemen, the victor of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games...District One Female, Glimmer Sarinas!” _

Her father once told her that if she planned on winning the Games she should deform herself as much as possible while in the Arena, and she really does try her best. The stunt with the Jackers. Taking the hit meant for Mellark when Cato tries to break the alliance early. The arrows slipping past her sides. The burns.

Glimmer wakes up two weeks after the Games with every feature restored, enhanced. She’s well taught in the art of hiding her screams and that’s the only reason she can keep the hysteria from bubbling, biting her tongue so hard it bleeds. (They give her a cream to heal that, too.) Topaz promises her that her parents are safe back in One and awaiting her return. The Capitol is adoring. The President is most pleased with her performance. The moment when she stabbed Mellark through the eye after learning he really _did_ attempt to save his district partner is on the Top 10 Games Moments. “They wanted to give you a blue eye, too,” Topaz says, “but we convinced them that the green could be your signature look.” 

Topaz reaches out to touch Glimmer’s face and the two women sit in silence, not crying. 

“He suspects,” Topaz says. “Don’t confirm it.” 

Glimmer plays to the cameras until they let her go home. Her dresses are wisps of fabric. Her smiles are alluring. She is photographed from every angle. She forgets what underwear feels like. She doesn’t let herself think about how her father is seeing every one of these images: his last daughter, turned into yet another sex symbol for the Capitol. 

She returns home and he hugs her tighter than he ever has before. 

“You did it,” he mumbles. “You stupid girl, you did it. Didn’t I tell you not to go?”

“You also told me to come back,” Glimmer reminds him. “Aren’t you glad I kept this promise?” 

He just shakes his head. 

_Don’t confirm it,_ Topaz said, and so Glimmer doesn’t. She doesn’t let anyone realize she is intelligent and loves reading and nature. She discusses pornos with the Capitol liaison and prepares herself for production after her Tour. She giggles and drapes herself in fabric and bangles that clash. She goes for tea with the other victors and the Capitolites that visit. 

When she is 42 but looks barely 30 (there are balms and operations for that) she becomes pregnant with her first child. “I thought I was too old to worry about pregnancy,” she tells the president, “it won’t happen again.”

“You’re right,” he tells her. She knows better than to beg for her father’s life and nearly collapses with relief when he tells her that he trusts her loyalty and knows this was an unhappy accident. She has the baby and names her Mahogany. A few moments later, Mahogany is taken from her. 42 though she may be, Glimmer still looks luscious and nubile and the president is not ready to let her go.

Everyone knows that the freak train accident that kills her two months later was really a suicide, but two workers from 6 are executed anyway. The District 1 victors receive warnings, and things move on. Mahogany is adopted into an upstanding Capitolian family and renamed Mauritania. When Maur is 14 she watches the 74th Games for the first time and throws popcorn at the screen when D1-F shoots D2-M, her favorite, through the heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love that Glimmer gets more depth in the fandom. I don't like the ditzy sex symbol thing she was in the books, but I love the trend of giving District 1 more nuance, so here's my take on her.


	3. 3. Crying Clover

3\. Crying Clover

_“Ladies and gentlemen, the victor of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games...District Two Male, Cato Garcia!” _

When Cato is pulled from the Arena, brash and bloody, he is not given the medications and relaxants that they pump into all of the other kids because District 2 men are supposed to be strong and impenetrable and at least a little bit of a sadomasochist and doesn’t Mr. Cato Garcia, our favorite from the beginning, fit the bill? The cuts on his face still smart when he marches across the stage for the Victory Ceremony and Cato thinks that they’ve medicated him so that his skin is thin and tight because when he smiles in front of Caesar the scabs break open and the blood drips down his face like it did in that final battle against Thresh, with his scythe and then his pounding fists and then his nothing. The Remake doctors get their reward; the crowd screams itself practically to _orgasm_ before Caesar can get them back in control. 

When they watch the movie Cato is brash and bloody and he didn’t expect any less. He knew since being chosen to volunteer that his angle would be the brutal killing machine and that being painted as a monster was what he was due. They make him into the villain, revealing that Lover Boy really was trying to protect the Bitch on Fire from the beginning, weaving said bitch into a tragic heroine who rescued her little sister and then rescued the chit from 11 and grieving so hard when Lover Boy bites it at Cato’s hands and then building a little murder-family with the 11s, taking care of each other, oh how cute, and meanwhile he and Clove carve their way through the competition and yes, he killed Katniss and then killed 11-F and then killed Thresh but when the big moments come he grins and eats it up, making muscles and flicking blood off of his face. Smirking machismo. He thinks of how Clove would roll her eyes if she saw him like this, playing at the manly man. _Think you’re sexy, Garcia?_ she’d ask, and he’d answer _you’d_ know _I’m sexy if you weren’t such a little girl_ and she’d punch him. Only now she was dead. 

The Capitol goes wild for him. He knew they would. He also knows that in the districts they must be spitting on their TVs, chittering like the rats they are about what a monster he is, how he bathes in blood and sucks the marrow of little boys’ bones, how he can turn into a bat if he tries hard enough—he’s heard it all from Brutus and Maladrius and Shale and he doesn’t particularly care. He’s spent his life building to this point and he knows better than to have regrets. So what if he’s the villain? So what if he killed people? Those kids were all going to die in the end. Everyone knows the odds. Cato knows he’s a hero for playing this game, because it’s his sacrifice and his complacency that keeps Panem from bleeding itself dry in more civil war. So yeah, he’ll let himself be the villain. He thinks of Clove again:_ What, Garcia, you want a cookie or something?_ Any loyal person would do it. As the crown is placed on his head, Cato looks into President Snow’s eyes and thinks of Clove, trying to trasmit some of the joy of the moment to her. _ I won, Clove. Lookit me now._

Only after the interview, after the world is partying outside and Cato is back in his quarters, drinking hot chocolate, does his mentor Valerius come into his room and inform him that “look, this year there was a rape in the Games and they kept it hidden during the movie but I figured you should know before someone else broke it to you.” The news doesn’t sink in for very long and so Valerius gives a rueful—no, he can’t use that word anymore—a baleful smile and say “sorry that might’ve been a lot to dump on you like that but really, we’re all proud of your victory and that’s what matters.”

The news doesn’t feel quite real, it feels like something Valerius would say when hopped up on drugs or wanting to mess with him because there was no indication of it in the videos—

“They shut off the cameras,” Valerius explains. “Not for us, I mean. We saw it.”

“...oh.”

He doesn’t know what the right response is. He feels sick. He’s used to seeing kids dying but not watching—_that_—and he’s horrified to think of how often it might happen. He doesn’t want to know. And that’s a weak response. Clove would know how to react better than him, she was always a little better at that stuff, a little wilier, even though they were both on the spectrum she was better than he was, but he tries to muster up some strength. It’s over now. They’re all dead, and there’s no point. 

Except, he thinks, there was a rapist in the Games and they still made Cato into the villain. 

It could’ve been Clove and he doesn’t want to think about that and anyway Clove would’ve known how to protect herself but some of these stupid fodder tributes don’t and—  
He suddenly wishes that he had some painkillers for his still-bleeding face, something to make him woozy and not feel whatever this is—sympathy? Disgust? But there’s nothing. Because Cato is brash and bloody and the Capitol does what is best.

“Valerius, I want to go out,” Cato says.

“You’re not cleared for that.”

“You care that much?”

Valerius shrugs.

And so they go out. They look upon the hedonism of the Capitol and they throw themselves in. It’s a week of partying, of Brutus lecturing him in the morning and Valerius, eyes bloodshot and hair mussed beyond reason mockingly repeating Brutus’s words and saying “yeah, Cato, yah insubordinate fuck” and Brutus turning his anger on Valerius, too. Cato learns to self-medicate with caffeine and cocaine until he ends up in a Lower Capitol tattoo parlor with the artist cutting _Clover_ into his arm and Valerius sprawled on his lap, giggling with drugs, and Brutus slams his way in and drags them back to their quarters.

It’s with chagrin that Cato lets Brutus introduce him to his newest addiction, melatonix, which puts him so deeply asleep that it might as well be an eight-hour coma. He stays on it until the day he dies. The _Clover_ tattoo becomes infected and Valerius washes and bandages it for him rather than let any Capitolian touch it, not when they’d remove it, not when it would be reported for being an unsanctioned modification. When Cato goes on the Victory Tour the tattoo does become infected, probably from the coal dust in 12, and it bleeds and oozes pus but Cato is brash and bloody and doesn’t care. He feels sick in every district because he can’t stop thinking about _who, who, who,_ which parents maybe watched their kid get assaulted on TV and couldn’t stop it, and he doesn’t like the feeling of confusion and sympathy and guilt because he’s a brutal killing machine and they’ve taught him not to feel those things. He tries to push it down. He spends the next two years touring the Capitol, months on end, party after interview after meeting after orgy after seeing who-knows-who who-knows-where, and then spends a golden year at home learning how to tattoo other people.

In the 81st he mentors for the first time. Slate is precise and subordinate and lean, everything that Cato was not, and he listens to everything Cato says but doesn’t change his actions or his persona and he makes it to the final three before the girl from 4 stabs him through the heart. Cato grips the edge of the console so hard that the flesh on his knuckles splits open and stomps out of the room. The media takes pictures of the bleeding knuckles and sells them as posters and Cato is asked to sign, again and again, but fans in the Capitol. Two weeks later, when Rhisa is out of Remake and going to her Victory Ceremony, the two of them have sex in an elevator. 

There must have been cameras because the president finally calls him in.

“Mr. Garcia, I worry that your behavior has become rather destructive.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

“Ah! Mr. President! You’re nowhere near as rebellious as GamesNews makes you out to be.”

“Well, you’re not exactly a regular citizen, Mr. President.”

President Snow smiles and then Cato remembers that he watched whatever girl it was get raped and did nothing about it and covered it up. Does he not know? Does he care? Why does Cato care? It’s over, and he had no part in it.

“For the most part, you’re the pinnacle of loyalty. Except for your father. Clarence Garcia, wasn’t it? Dead in a...quarry accident?”

Cato’s father was shot by Peacekeepers. That was when Cato was taken to the District Boarding School for Talented Youth. Cato doesn’t like to think about any of that. A sour taste rises to his mouth. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“And your tattoo.”

Cato flinches.

He was strong. He was brash, bloody Cato Garcia. And now he feels weak.

“Yes, Mr. President.”

He’s hauled into Remake the next day by Peacekeepers that he recognizes from the School and _CloverClover_ is rejected. It’s at that point that he finally starts to understand that the Capitol does not care about honoring the past, they want to erase every trace of the real people that died in the war and the Games and just keep around the pageantry of it all, that he is just a decoration, that his body is a decoration for them and not for himself. That girl during the Games, she was just a spectacle, she was just a prop. They’d’ve let Clove be a prop if it got to that point. They are all props in some bigger game that he’s not smart enough to see.

He gets Valerius to tattoo _Clover_ between his shoulderblades and the man is happy to comply. 

They’re both taken into custody and reminded of the importance of obedience. There’s no anesthesia for the water torture or electrocution either, but Cato expects nothing less and he’s learned his lesson. When it’s over he’s the brash and bloody mouthpiece of the Capitol once more. Every night he writes _Clover_ on his wrists and washes it off in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the things I liked about the HG movie was them giving Cato a little more depth. I don't think he's some uwu misunderstood soft boi but I do think he deserves a little more sympathy than he gets. Thanks to the fandom for giving him more depth!


	4. If I Should Scream

_“Ladies and gentlemen, the victor of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games...District Two Female, Clover Farley!” _

When Clove is pulled out of the Arena, brutal and bloody, she is pumped full of sedatives and medications but due to her concussion they have to keep her awake and so for five days she hovers somewhere between unconciousness and the Arena, unable to scream, unable to beg for Cato or Enobaria, feeling like there are bricks on her chest and barely able to breathe. Every few hours someone comes in and sticks her with a needle again and Clove would never do something like beg but they almost have her to that point, she wants to sob and shout and get on her knees and implore them to stop. 

When she’s released from Remake, shiny and breasts removed and with an empty look in her eyes, she spends her first night alone. She wakes up with a scream and bites her fist to keep it all in. She wonders if Enobaria will hear it and come to her door but the older woman doesn’t. Instead it’s Alexandrion, the victor of the 71st, who taught Clove wilderness survival at the school. They’re friendly but he isn’t Enobaria, he isn’t her mentor, and Clove looks at him with a horribly lost look that she knows makes her look like a baby and she hates herself for it.

Clove is only fifteen and she has always been thin, a feature only exacerbated by constant malnutrition, and in Remake they removed her curves even further because the Capitol seems to like the vision of an innocent little girl murdering people. They call her Clover and dress her in doll-like dresses and croon over how lovely she is, how big her eyes are, how picturesque, and take pictures and ask her to lick the dried blood off the knives that she used to torture Marvel and the 11s and 12s to death. Clove dreams of Cato every night and wakes up screaming when Cato loses his eyes and drips blood from everywhere just like her other seven kills. Enobaria knocks on her door, but Clove shouts at her to go away, if Enobaria wanted to be here for her she should’ve done so when Clove needed her, Clove needed her and she was nowhere to be found and then there’s another crushing weight on her chest and she can’t move, she can’t speak, she can’t breathe. 

She helps Brutus mentor for the 76th. Penelope is strong and pretty enough and talented with a sword but that’s not enough to make it past the gorgeous young man from 7 who hacks through the competition. Penelope’s pretty head falls from her body, and in two hacks her muscular waist is separated from her muscular thighs. Capitolians wear costumes with paint emulating the cuts. Clove tries to look away, but the press begs her to know what she thought of such beautiful bladework and blood and she smiles through it and gives them what they want.

Enobaria comes to her when they return home with the bodies. “That was a lot of blood.”

“Yeah.”

“You...okay?”

“Going soft on me, ‘Baria? You ripped out a boy’s throat with your teeth. The Games are blood. Don’t coddle me.”

“Still. It’s okay to admit that Penelope didn’t deserve that.”

“She’s a tribute. We all deserve what we get.”

“Always what the Capitol wants, huh?”

“Stop.”

Clove hopes Enobaria is lying. Enobaria is a lying bitch who abandoned Clove in the one moment that she needed support, but Clove doesn’t want her mentor to be a traitor.

She’s not. Enobaria, Alexandrion, Lyme, they’re all conspirators. Clove is the one to mention their constant meetings to the President. When the treason is revealed and five, five hundred, who knows, more heads are rolling, President Snow calls her in and thanks her for her exemplary service. When Snow dies Clove becomes a valued liason to District 2 from President Greeley. When she dies she’s buried in the Capitol with full honors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure how happy I am with this one--I tried to think about Clove's vulnerability and where that would logically go, but I think that I didn't take it down a path that works with her sense of loyalty and friendship (thinking about how she and Cato interacted). Any thoughts?


End file.
